A copy of a rare 1926 letter in which Ernest Hemingway offers to go "50-50" to publish Canadian writer Morley Callaghan is found in Toronto.

Hemingway in later years. “I’d be glad to go 50-50 with you on the cost of publishing it," he wrote in 1926 to his Paris publisher, championing a manuscript by Toronto's Morley Callaghan, whom he'd met working at The Star. "I think once he gets published it will clear things up and he can go on and not worry about this stuff.”

By:Bill SchillerForeign Affairs Reporter, Published on Fri May 04 2012

A rare copy of an unpublished 1926 letter by Ernest Hemingway has been found by the Toronto Star in unsorted papers in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto.

It is rare indeed, not only because it has never been published, but because it shows Hemingway at his most generous – so in love with the fiction of Toronto writer Morley Callaghan that he offers to go “50-50” with his own publisher to print a Callaghan novella.

Hemingway and Callaghan first met as Toronto Star reporters in 1923.

“He seems to me like a kid that is worth doing something about – if you like it,” Hemingway writes to his Paris publisher Robert McAlmon in May, 1926.

“I’d be glad to go 50-50 with you on the cost of publishing it because I think once he gets published it will clear things up and he can go on and not worry about this stuff.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer William Kennedy said he took special delight in reading the letter, shown to him by the Star, because “it gives you a sense of the generosity that was in Hemingway at that time.” In later years, Kennedy says, Hemingway was not often seen in the same light.

“He was punching people out,” he says.

But the letter also shows “how strongly Hemingway felt about Callaghan’s writing and how well he understood good literature. And he was right — Morley was a very good writer.”

Dr. Sandra Spanier, a Hemingway expert at Penn State University, confirmed that the letter, addressed “Dear Mac,” was to McAlmon, whose Contact Press in Paris published Hemingway’s first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems in 1923.

“To my knowledge this letter has never been published or cited in Hemingway biographies,” she said.

“I think it’s a fascinating letter and certainly demonstrates that Hemingway was a sincere and generous supporter of Callaghan’s works.”

Noted writer-editor Barry Callaghan, Callaghan’s son, was surprised and pleased to learn of the letter.

“I’ve never seen it. Never heard of it. I want to see it immediately,” he said.

Viewing it at the kitchen table in his Rosedale, Toronto home — the very home Morley Callaghan built on the back of his own writing — the younger Callaghan called the letter “pretty startling.”

“Startling for any writer, let alone Hemingway,” he said. “There is a real competition among writers. And you don’t often find them going out of their way to recommend other writers to publishers — let alone offering to put up money.”

Callaghan said it was an odd sensation reading a letter in which his late father was referred to as “a kid.”

Morley Callaghan, who died in 1990, was a trailblazer in Canadian literature and published regularly in the New Yorker, mostly during the 1930s, years before other Canadian writers like Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro achieved similar success.

A new collection of his writing is scheduled to be published this year by the New Canadian Library.

“If you were handed this letter and asked ‘What major American writer wrote this?’ you’d never say ‘Hemingway,’” says the younger Callaghan. “This is just not the way Hemingway was presented in his later years and indeed not the way he presented himself.”

Jennifer Toews, of the manuscripts section of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, said she was “excited” to have pulled the copy of the letter from unsorted papers of Toronto antiquarian book dealer David Mason.

She was searching for something else Hemingway-related at the request of the Star.

She didn’t know of the significance of the find until the Star checked with Hemingway experts.

“It’s exciting to know that it’s a find,” she said Thursday.

Hemingway and Callaghan would end their friendship in 1929, after a controversial boxing match in which Callaghan decked the bigger Hemingway, embarrassing him to no end.

The actual letter is in the hands of a private dealer in the U.S. the Star learned later. It is for sale for $17,500.

It is handwritten on blue paper with some perforations in it on the margins — likely from having been kept in a ringed notebook. Hemingway is in Paris and dashes off the letter as he is about to depart for Madrid.

As it turned out, McAlmon did not publish the manuscript, then entitled Backwater. But it was later published in a 1928 anthology in the U.S. under the title, An Autumn Penitent.

Kennedy, a self-described “Hemingway carnivore,” says the letter reveals a doubly generous side of Hemingway given that he was. “just starting out himself.”

But until now, Hemingway’s enduring image has been more that of a proud and, occasionally, pugnacious personality.

In fact, Kennedy has a scene in his new novel Chango’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes set in Hemingway’s favourite Havana bar, the Floridita.

Hemingway takes umbrage at someone singing a song there.

“And Hemingway punches the guy out,” says Kennedy.

IN SATURDAY’S STAR: New letters reveal Star’s role in Hemingway’s meteoric rise.

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